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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   35131 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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Judith Butler is putting an unbounded demand for empathy as default and defining everything else as cruelty. You can't get it with me anymore. I can see the transparent attempt at manipulation. I didn't want to be a cruel person, but if I want anything for myself I have to be. Empathy requires reciprocal return. Why should I care for people who hate me and want to see me destroyed?

Empathy doesn't require reciprocity. Sympathy does. The word has gone the same way "tolerance" has: skinsuited for a rhetorical advantage.

If you're unempathetic you don't have a meaningful disagreement, you're just ignorant. That sort of knowledge isn't finite. Meaningful sympathy, the sort that imposes costs, is always a limited resource and generally parochial and isn't inherently increased by empathy . The question at the heart of politics is where that line is drawn.

I would rather have perfect empathy than have perfect sympathy and be Wolf's moral saint.

Indeed, for this to work, you need a lack of reciprocity. But standing up and saying "hey, where's the empathy for me?" marks you as a boor and/or a buffoon. But that's enemy action too -- it is their cultural instruments which have done that.

Everyone pushing defect ends poorly. Beyond utility, there is virtue.

It should be the goal and ambition of every man to have his grandchildren scorn him as a villain and imperialist, knowing that they live lives of supreme comfort and ease to feel guilt over the transcendent elevation over the unwashed masses of the global diversity.

Survival is pre-moral. The dead have no say in morality.

What do you make of martyrdom in light of that view? It seems to me that favouring morality over survival has worked in the past at least in some instances and at least some martyrs have had quite a say in morality.

Objectivists and other radical individualists take this to make ultimate sacrifice immoral (a bout of pathological altruism).

I have a less radical position. I view sacrifice as only valuable if it helps the living. Dying to save one's own is glorious. Dying for ideas alone is ignominious.

Well said. At the end of the day, acting virtuously is good in and of itself. The fact that many people don't understand this any more is a key cause of decay in our society.

I think there is a trap for the Republicans: being virtuous losers. Upstanding polite candidates like Romney are smeared as misogynistic "vulture capitalists" "who are going to put black people back in chains" and bear it with dignity. Then he loses and presumably is comforted by knowing he went high when they went low.

Rather than being virtuous, maybe the Republicans should win even if that means ratfucking the Democrats. The term "ratfucking" being invented to describe what you should do to win.

But what if an upstanding and polite civil society is the very thing I want to preserve? Ratfucking the Democrats simply means joining them in tearing it down. If I want to preserve traditional Western morality and institutions, I don't see how surrendering my political movement to a libertine billionaire with autocratic tendencies is going to help me win that fight, however skilled he may be at winning elections. In the short term it might improve a few issues because he will give some political quid pro quo pandering to actual conservatives, but I find it hard to believe surrendering a political movement to a figurehead who is hostile to its very principles is the winning play to bring about those principles.

They probably will do that, because politicians (regardless of affiliation) are just about the most amoral, do-whatever-it-takes people in existence. But they shouldn't do that. If morality means anything at all, you must stick to it even when it is personally inconvenient. It is far better, morally speaking, to be a virtuous loser than a vicious winner.

personally inconvenient

The alleged claim of political partisans is that letting the other side win will ruin the nation. "Sure, I enabled an act of horrific societal self-destruction. But I was really polite while failing to stop it."

People tend to transform into consequentialists when the consequences become too great.

But they shouldn't do that. If morality means anything at all, you must stick to it even when it is personally inconvenient.

Even non-divine command deontological systems depend on the rule being a good thing overall. It's fine for a rule to be bad sometimes.

But if the rule you followed consistently brings you and all you value to defeat it is not a good rule.

If you're worried about outcomes, you really aren't in deontology land any more. You're in consequentialism land. Which is fine, but... that isn't deontology.

no deontologists exist because no one pulls morality from the ether; the deontologists of today are little more than traditionalists who have adopted consequence tested morality from their ancestors

the "deontologists" of yesteryear who picked suicide duties and rules are gone, forgotten, and irrelevant

Oh goody! I get another opportunity to share this gem of a paper.

No, because such a ruleset will require the "virtuous loser" to go extinct. If your morality requires extinction, it is of no use because it will always lose and make the world worse as time goes on. A morality which consistently makes the world worse if followed isn't a morality worth adopting. It only survives because other better men are willing to do what is necessary to create the space for the "virtuous loser" to survive at all.

The virtuous loser is not virtuous, he's a coward who is surrendering to entropy.

The virtuous loser is not virtuous, he's a coward who is surrendering to entropy.

If you don't see the difference between principle and cowardice, we truly will never agree on this.

There is a difference and yet they're not mutually exclusive. And many times, they're the same thing. In the context of what we're talking about with American politics; the virtuous losers were cowards who weren't willing to make the hard decisions to save their progeny and nation from being reshaped by their enemies. It's easy to be the virtuous loser, it's hard to make and do the things necessary to win.

And even if you acknowledged the above, I still don't think we will ever agree on this. For the "virtuous" losers, they've made being losers their identities. They already have their crosses built.

It is far better, morally speaking, to be a virtuous loser than a vicious winner.

This philosophy, like the Amish, can at best only exist surrounded by the guns of those who don't share it.

It’s almost too perfect, really.

Okay, but can it be their side that does the virtuous losing and my side that does the vicious winning? I'm content with that state of affairs. They can win as many moral victories as they like and I can have the actual victories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Story_of_Ah_Q

I don't disagree, but it wouldn't be hard to based upon how one defines 'morality'. What it means to be moral is rarely even discussed, perhaps because the once-bedrock shared understandings which would have made such conversation possible have been so badly eroded. This occurs to me as concerning.

It is far better, morally speaking, to be a virtuous loser than a vicious winner.

What would you say to someone who asks 'why?'

I don't disagree, but it wouldn't be hard to based upon how one defines 'morality'. What it means to be moral is rarely even discussed, perhaps because the once-bedrock shared understandings which would have made such conversation as possible have been so badly eroded. This occurs to me as concerning.

That's fair. I think it's a serious problem that we have so little shared foundation in the US today. I think it's very important that a nation has a set of shared values or goals to anchor them in times of internal disagreement, and it seems like we don't often have that any more.

What would you say to someone who asks 'why?'

Good question. I gave it some thought and I honestly don't know. I believe it because it was drilled into me from a young age by my parents. But I don't think I could provide an argument outside that context. I'm kind of bad at that sort of thing in general, and it's especially hard for me to think of a solid argument for my moral axioms (as this is).

Wisdom is a virtue though, one that would often consider taking harsh actions in order to achieve a a better future to be worth the cost.

Perhaps, but that's not what was originally under discussion. The original statement was "Empathy requires shared reciprocity. Why should I care for people who hate me and want to see me destroyed?". This is at best indifference, and at worst outright hatred. In neither case is it a virtuous attempt to take harsh actions to achieve a better future, it's just giving in to base instincts.

I was reacting mostly to

Everyone pushing defect ends poorly. Beyond utility, there is virtue.

Pushing defect is sometimes the wiser choice, especially when ones decisions impact dependants. The self-satisfaction one can feel by acting with maximum empathy is easily counterweighed by having lacked the wisdom to protect those who rely on our decisions. Which, in democratic societies, is theoretically the entire country.

Pushing defect is sometimes the wiser choice

Especially when you already see your opponent holding down their defect button. Then it is just a choice to self-sabotage by cooperating with an open defector or to "make everyone worse off".

The most optimal game theory agent is the “firm but fair” player who cooperates of others do as well, but defects if others defect. So far the west has been cooperating in the face of wanton defection. Only now are we applying firm but fair. Cue the wailing and gnashing of teeth

Pushing cooperate when the other side pushes defect ends worst of all. There is no virtue at all to playing that game, especially because people only tolerate that state of affairs due to the social pressure saying it's totally a moral good for one side to forever push cooperate and the other side to forever push defect. It's not noble.

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